Windows and Words

Contents

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pp. v-vi

Introduction

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pp. 1-9

...sky New Year's Eve 1999 illuminating a new millennium. The temporal shift from the last thousand years to the next made us Canadians consider who we were, who we are, and what we might become. A few blocks from the Hill at the Canadian Children's Literature Symposium on the campus of the University of Ottawa earlier that same year, a devoted group of...

The Apprehension of Audience: The Difference Between Writing for Adults and Children

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pp. 11-21

...A little spooky, perhaps, considering that the banner under which this annual spring event takes place is "Reappraisals: Canadian Writers." I don't feel quite dead enough yet to be reappraised, personally. But certainly there is a healthy body of Canadian children's literature out there very worthy of scholarly attention. Other speakers, this weekend, will be...

Canadian Children's Literature at the Millennium

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pp. 23-34

...Canadian children's literature at the millennium, it is important to remember that Canada is a young country and our children's literature, in comparison to the more than 300-year-old British children's literature, is also still young. Many publishers, writers, and critics have observed that our children's literature may go back over 100 years, but that it has only shown...

The Rise of the Aboriginal Voice in Canadian Adolescent Fiction 1970–1990

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pp. 35-48

...Canadian fiction for adolescents published between 1970 and 1990 and still in print today. The study begins in 1970 in order to take account of conditions immediately before and after the 1973 Royal Commission on Publishing, and ends in 1990 to allow for the time it takes a novel to show staying power. Novels with an Aboriginal focus stood out from all the rest...

A Parliament of Stories: Multiculturalism and the Contemporary Children's Literature of Saskatchewan

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pp. 49-60

...literary culture, and indeed Canadian society in general, is how to respond to our nation's ever increasing multiculturalism. Children's literature is probably not the first kind of text that intellectuals expect to explore this difficult issue, and Saskatchewan may be the last place, perhaps, that most Canadians expect to produce an answer. However, anyone familiar with...

Retelling "Little Red Riding Hood" Abroad and at Home

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pp. 61-76

...tales has become a very widespread international trend in children's literature, and it will come as no surprise to anyone that the most retold tale of all is Little Red Riding Hood. More than three hundred years after her literary debut in France, Little Red Riding Hood is alive and well and thriving in contemporary children's literature around the world. The tricentenary...

Secrecy and Space: Glenn Gould and Tim Wynne-Jones's The Maestro

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pp. 77-86

...children, with its opportunities for escape into secret spaces, is one which, according to J. M. Barrie, adults can recall but not inhabit: "We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more" (Barrie 1911, 14). Barrie's island of juvenile make-believe is therefore one within which only children can live completely comfortably....

Brian O'Connal and Emily Byrd Starr: The Inheritors of Wordsworth's "Gentle Breeze"

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pp. 87-96

...not help but consider the pivotal role played by Who Has Seen the Wind in the development of my interest in Canadian literature dealing with the child and subsequently in Canadian children's literature. In Mitchell's novel I found a merging of a number of areas that interested me: the growth of the Romantic child, the sublimity of the Canadian landscape...

The Eros of Childhood and Early Adolescence in Girl Series: L. M. Montgomery's Emily Trilogy

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pp. 97-118

...putative "innocence" of children's books, pointing to the complexity of the genre's ideological and political messages. Indeed, as theorists of children's literature and culture have documented only very recently, products for children ranging from literature to toys are rarely value-free or apolitical, for sexually charged Barbie Dolls and asexual Anne Dolls encode specific...

"not one of those dreadful new women": Anne Shirley and the culture of imperial motherhood

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pp. 119-130

...supplements reluctantly made to the popular "Anne" series by Lucy Maud Montgomery in the 1930s, a distraught Hazel Marr tells her once adored "Miss Shirley" "I'm not a bit ambitious . . . I'm not one of those dreadful new women. My highest ambition was to be a happy wife and make a happy home for my husband" (1936, 187). Hazel's self-referential italics convey the implication that Anne Shirley, principal of Summerside ...

L. M. Montgomery: Canon or Cultural Capital?

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pp. 131-141

...the literary canon and cultural capital. Literary works have a cultural capital that is fixed by the university institution. If a work is part of the canon, a canon determined by the university, it has high cultural capital. By extension, noncanonical works are those not prized by the university, so they have little value as cultural capital. Works that have a high cultural capital...

L. M. Montgomery and Everybody Else: A Look at the Books

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pp. 143-174

...Using comparisons to understand a topic is valid, in general as well as in scholarly life. By looking at two or more things together, we can see each more clearly. We see similarities and differences, and we can get a better understanding of each thing individually. We can understand something new in terms of what we know already. We can determine what is...

From Pagan to Christian: The Symbolic Journey of Anne of Green Gables

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pp. 175-183

On July 5, 1911, Lucy Maud Montgomery married a Presbyterian minister named Ewan MacDonald to whom she had been secretly engaged for five years, since October 12, 1906. In subsequent years Maud's ideas about Christian doctrine went through some significant changes, but at the time Anne of Green Gables was written they...

The Picture Book: A Commentary

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pp. 185-190

...illustrated stories in picture book format. Generally I write for older children and, when I consider the work of Michael Solomon, the art director of so many fine picture books or the picture books written and illustrated by Marie-Louise Gay, I know myself to be an apprentice. But then I have known this for some time. Years ago I was a reviewer of children's books...

Publishing Children's Picture Books: The Role of Design and Art Direction

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pp. 191-200

...in the self-perception of graphic designers seems to be that encapsulated in Rodney Dangerfield's famous formula. A recent column by Roy Behrens, a professor of art and teacher of design history, asks why it is that architects, playwrights, composers, actors, choreographers, even fashion designers are known to a general audience outside their fields, and are even widely celebrated...

The Changing Faces of Canadian Children: Pictures, Power, and Pedagogy

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pp. 201-218

...a book by its cover." But the cover of an unknown work can attract us with its visual design, and the illustrations often draw us further into the work. Who hasn't read a page or so of the work and then flipped through the pictures to get an idea of the story or worth of the text? Although we know that the pictures sometimes don't reflect the text, they contain values and...

The Nature of Canadian Children's Literature: A Commentary

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pp. 219-225

...international aspects of Canadian children's literature, and Professor Waterston has examined some aspects of children's literature outside Canada. Accordingly, I'll begin by linking my comments to theirs with a look at the nature of Canadian children's literature in relation to international and national factors.¹ Canadian children's literature: how can such a field be justified?...

The Nature of Children's Literature: A Commentary

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pp. 227-232

...Children's Literature"—that is, a stream of stories and poems for children, mostly in English and French, accompanied by a trickle of Aboriginal legends.¹ This specific literature rose roughly in 1750, swelled into some significance around 1850, and reached the proportions of a small tide roughly 1950. But now we are to expand our focus. We are to consider the nature...

Contributors, List of Other Titles in Series

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pp. 233-239